Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)
See the following -
Plans in the Making for Peace Corps EHR
The Peace Corps plans to acquire a comprehensive electronic health records system to serve its volunteers stationed in 77 developing countries. The agency wants to develop a proof of concept electronic health record (EHR) and test it in a limited pilot by September and deploy it in fiscal 2013.
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Platform Terminology Explains Why Today's Patient Portals CAN NOT Work (Part 1)
Patient portals have tremendous potential — but that potential has not been realized and CAN NOT be realized as portals are currently configured. An understanding of platform business models and strategy explains why today’s patient portals are inherently suboptimal. This essay is the first in an occasional series that will look at patient portals through the lenses of platform business models and strategy. Today’s post will introduce and explain platform terminology of multihoming and single homing. Future posts will look more deeply into “why” current patient portals can’t work and will propose options for portals that could work for patients.
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Plug and Play Healthcare: Open Middleware and the Emergence of a Functional Interoperability Framework
“A middleware architecture has been shown to be the best technological solution for addressing the problem of EHR interoperability. The middleware platform facilitates the transparent, yet secure, access of patient health data, directly from the various databases where it is stored. A server-based middleware framework supporting access to the various patient health data stores allows for a scalable, unified and standardized platform for applications to be developed upon. The middleware architectural design has been successfully used to link data from multiple databases, irrespective to the database platform or where the database is located,” says Voltz. Read More »
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popHealth App Challenge Launched by ONC and Health 2.0
We should be seeing major improvements to the open source popHealth reporting tool as a result of a Challenge Award just announced by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and Health 2.0. It is hoped that the awards will motivate developers to create innovative applications that will enhance the open source tool beyond its current capabilities. The hope is that the challenge will generate new methods of leveraging the program’s current reporting functions and open source framework to help providers better understanding and care for patient populations...
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popHealth Tools Development Challenge: Winners Announced
At HIMSS today, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and Health 2.0 announced the three winners of the popHealth Tool Development Challenge: Team popEYE, Team Agent and Team greatOne. Congratulations to the winners! Read More »
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Positive Future For Health Information Exchange On The Way?
Even with the increased adoption and meaningful use of EHR technologies, current attempts at healthcare reform will not avoid history repeating itself unless the EHR adopters participate in health information exchange (HIE). Otherwise, it is simply the condition of adding new solutions to those that came before them. Read More »
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Precision Medicine Requires Unlocking Data from EHRs, Other Sources
Venture Funding for Digital Health in 2015 Reaches 2014 Level
Health information technology is “foundational” to President Obama’s $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative aimed at treating the specific needs and characteristics of individual patients, according to Karen DeSalvo, M.D., national coordinator for HIT. Read More »
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Precision Medicine, Blue Button Among White House Big Data Efforts
Precision medicine, medical research, and improved patient engagement through initiatives like Blue Button are among the highlight achievements of the Obama Administration’s emphasis on data transparency and information sharing, says a White House fact sheet celebrating the nation’s big data progress. The following is a rundown of some of the specific open-data health efforts of the Obama Administration...
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Precision Medicine: Analytics, Data Science and EHRs in the New Age
The promise of genomics and personalized care are closer than many realize. But clinical systems and EHRs are not ready yet. While policymakers and innovators play catch-up, here’s a look at what you need to know. Considering how fast technology advances in the healthcare industry, it seems natural that a once-innovative concept could become obsolete in the span of, say, a dozen years. Knowledge, comprehension and capabilities continue moving forward, and if the instruments of support don't keep pace, it can cause a rift to appear. If nothing is done, it can exacerbate into a seismic event...
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Problems with Health Information Exchange Resist Cures (Part 1)
Given that Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) received 564 million dollars in the 2009 HITECH act to promote health information exchange, one has to give them credit for carrying out a thorough evaluation of progress in that area. The results? You don’t want to know. There are certainly glass-full as well as glass-empty indications in the 98-page report that the ONC just released. But I feel that failure dominated. Basically, there has been a lot of relative growth in the use of HIE, but the starting point was so low that huge swaths of the industry remain untouched by HIE...
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Proposed Rules Would Extend EHR Safe Harbor
The CMS and HHS' inspector general's office have issued a pair of complementary proposed rules to extend 2006 waivers that relaxed federal Stark and anti-kickback laws to promote the use of electronic health-record systems. Read More »
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Provider EHR Adoption Is Only One Half Of Meaningful Use
With the beginning of Stage 2 Meaningful Use approaching in several months for eligible hospitals, healthcare organizations participating in the EHR Incentive Programs will need to exceed thresholds for exchanging health information between providers and between providers and patients. Read More »
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Providers, EHR Vendors Lag On Copy-Paste, Fraud Safegaurds
Hospitals, clinicians and health IT companies could be doing more to control EHR copy-and-pasting and over-documentation and prevent potential fraud, according to the HHS Inspector General. Read More »
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Q&A: An ONC HIT Workforce Development Program Success Story
Robert Reedy was bored by his IT job. After 17 years encompassing various straight IT roles, spanning break-fix to networking, he needed a change. Reedy considered going back to school for nursing, until he found about ONC’s HIT Workforce Development Program, that is. Read More »
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Query Health to Demo 'Round Trip' at HIMSS12
Michael Buck, PhD, just might be the poster boy for Query Health. ONC’s distributed querying initiative is gearing up to enable physicians and public health officials to ask simple questions against complex and diverse systems spanning geographic regions to get real-time health data in return – and to do so without building the sort of mammoth data warehouse IBM or Oracle would showcase. Read More »
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